I have a raid 0 setup with 2 SATA hard drives (WD raptor 10k) on winxp. Now I’ve added 2 additional hard drives on the same machine just for extra storage space. One of them is a SATA 640GB and the other is an IDE 80GB. My motherboard is an Asus A8V socket 939 with via chipset. In order to install windows xp on the SATA 640gb, I had to load the raid floppy driver by using the f6 command during winxp setup. I’m not sure why it needed a raid driver. It’s not like i’m putting this 640gb hdd into a raid setup. As a matter of fact, I don’t want to mess with the current raid 0 setup at all, since I use it mostly for heavy duty tasks like copying large files. So it installed windows on the 640gb. I then went into windows explorer, and I noticed that I can see and access the other two hard drive setups (the raid 0 setup, and the IDE hard drive). I rebooted and logged into the old raid 0 setup in winxp, and even from there I could still access the other two hard drive setups (the new 640gb and the IDE hard drive). C: drive is the raid 0 setup, F: is the IDE hdd, and G: is the 640gb. My main concern is that I don’t want the raid 0 setup’s performance to be compromised due to these 2 new hard drives. I thought that you wouldn’t be able to see and access the other hard drives from windows because they are on different channels. The VIA RAID TOOL in windows xp (in the raid 0 setup) shows that there are 2 items – Array 0 (RAID 0) and WDC 640AAKS (which is the 640gb). Array type for Array0 looks normal as it says “Striping”. Looking under stripe disk 0 it shows – Controller 0, Channel 0, Master Looking under stripe disk 1 it shows – Controller 0, Channel 1, Master And under the WDC 640AAKS it shows Controller 0, Channel 2, Master Now when I enter the RAID BIOS utility, it shows that both stripe disks are on controller 0 and channel 0. The via raid tool shows differently as you can see. Also, it shows THE WDC 640g under Channel 1 instead of Channel 2 like the via raid tool shows. When I boot up the computer, it shows the two WD raptor hard drives under the RAID section, and the WDC 640gb under the “No raid” section. So can someone please tell me if I’ve done anything wrong, or more importantly - anything that is compromising the raid 0 setup’s performance. Thanks in advance
I got some responses on other forums that seems to indicate the setup is ok but I do need some more help - I've discovered a problem with my setup just today - I've been trying to copy files from the 640gb HDD onto itself but the copy dialog box freezes and stutters and takes a long time to complete the operation. A simple 300mb file will say it's gonna take 60 seconds but it takes much longer because the copy dialog box's animation thingy freezes for a good 5-10 seconds every 20 seconds or so. It does complete the copy process each time, but it takes long and has those freezes. Note that this ONLY happens on the 640gb drive, not the other drives. Could this be a result of the onboard raid controller?
